It’s not the militarys fault. We could go province by province and kill all the Pashtuns off easily. Maybe 6 months but no one would stand for it. We should just leave. The whole 9-11 attack was by Israel anyways. Pashtuns had nothing to do with it.

Look at a map, and then tell me that they’re somehow going to withdraw into those mountains, fighting all the way. Even if there was this mass of insanely competent and entirely imaginary Indian militarists who were “out to get” the Pakistanis, that idea makes precisely zero sense. And, if you’ve ever looked into the Indian military’s procurement issues, you would do as I do, and laugh hysterically at the idea. India can’t even design, build, or procure its own modern small arms, and you want me to take them as a threat to Pakistan? While they’re simultaneously forced to deal with China as a threat coming down out of the Himalayas? I’m rolling on the floor, here, my friend.

Pakistan is playing a long game, here, and the end goal is Muslim supremacy. That’s why they took Saudi money to be the cut-out for A.Q. Khan’s little nuclear club, and why they’re doing what they’re doing with the US. What I can’t quite believe is that our political class is stupid enough to play their game.

That may well be true, but apparently the reason the Pakistanis support the Taliban is that they fear India coming over the border. They need somewhere to retreat to to continue fighting any Indian invasion, so having an escape door into Afghanistan is good from their point of view. If the Taliban are on their side, they have help and no opposition to face.

“…we have been fighting the so-called terrorists since the Carter administration…”

Recent history yes, but we were fighting Islamic terrorist before the Constitution was formally adopted except we called them the Barbary pirates.

You can throw a lot of shit on the wall about the goddamn awful strategy of the Vietnam era, but at least, the people we had running the show back then had the good fucking sense to make the Soviets pay for supporting the NVA and the VC. The morons we have running things at the upper levels of our military/political combine today?

LOL… That’s all I can do: High, mad, hysterical laughter as I contemplate the true depth of our folly.

Basically, we’re subsidizing the assholes killing our soldiers, and on top of that, to add insult to injury, we’re bribing the same set of assholes to allow our logistics to get through to Afghanistan, allowing them to only skim off the cream from the logistics pipeline.

What should have happened, after 9/11? Pakistan and Saudi Arabia should have both been given ultimatums to turn over the people in their governments that aided and abetted the attacks, and after they didn’t do that, we should have glassed Riyadh and Abottabad, followed by any other targets of opportunity. There is no way that the ISI did not know what was being planned from within their territory; the Taliban, which was a creature of the ISI from day one, made the elimination of Massoud up in the Northern Alliance a precondition to the 9/11 attacks, and the freaks from al Qaeda complied. He died in an attack performed by al Qaeda operatives on 9 September, 2001.

Bush wanted to play nice, and not engage the Pakis directly because the predecessor administrations let them arm up with nukes. I presume his calculus was that if we attacked Pakistan directly, we’d see the Pakis throw their toys at what they could reach, and kill millions in India. So, the decision was made to attack indirectly, and take away the ISI’s toys–Which has manifestly not worked out.

What we should be doing is recognizing Pakistan’s role in all this, and dealing with them directly via things like embargoes and sanctions, followed by military action. Instead, we carefully look the other way, and ignore all the provocation they have offered, like the attacks in Kashmir, and Mumbai.

The root problem here isn’t the Pashtun; they’d be non-players without Pakistani logistics and shelter backing them up. The real root problem is the fact that our freakin’ military/political geniuses can’t identify and go after the true centers of gravity in this conflict, and that we’re basically subsidizing Pakistan to support the Taliban so they can kill our troops and innocent Afghanis.

I guarantee you that the minute the Pakis start paying a real price for what’s going on with the Taliban, the whole song-and-dance routine is going to be shut the hell down. You can’t run a guerrilla campaign without external logistical support and safe havens, and our “allies” the Pakistanis have been taking our money and providing both to the Taliban.

Or, did the fact that bin Laden was killed in Abbottabad escape everyone? WTF? Just how dumb is our leadership…?

A second important point is that we have been fighting so-called terrorists since the Carter administration, 40 years, six presidencies. We are still actively fighting in Somalia and in more than 30 other African countries. The result is that Islamic terrorist groups have spread across most of Africa, the entire Middle East, Central Asia, Western Europe, the Balkans, Indonesia and Malaysia and the Philippines. We are obviously losing this war and our actions are spreading terror rather than containing it. Yet, the neocons are happy, and wish to expand our wars by attacking North Korea, which, of course, would include war with both Russia and China.